The policy of splitting the command into bits, and leaving one platoon to carry on the seeming of the full force, had brought both disaster and success. The main body had taken a middle course upon which the smaller details might--theoretically--fall back, and on either side squads had scouted. While the men under Falkins were being misled and trapped, another detachment had slipped fortuitously upon a scouting party of the enemy, and, being less fatigued by reason of an easier course, they were stealing through the _bosque_ with unabated caution, and not one of that scouting party escaped alive except two who were captured. The detachment rejoined the platoon, and in view of the spirit in which the main command received these prisoners, they finally laid aside their show of sullen stubbornness and talked volubly. Not only did they talk, under the effective persuasion of their captors, but they acted. They agreed to lead the _Americanos_ to the camp of General Rosario, which they said was pitched in a particularly inaccessible part of the mountains only a day's march away. Then the command, which had for so long been following a fox-fire, rose up, invigorated by the prospect of final success, and all day they slipped forward through trails which they could not have found alone. They marched with the swiftness of the final spurt, and at nightfall lay under cover, feasting their eyes on a column of smoke which rose from a canyon where the enemy lay in fancied security. The captives had done their work well, once they had undertaken it, but the onslaught must be sudden. There must be no time given to slaughter the American prisoners whom Rosario was carrying north with him as a present for Aguinaldo. They could but admire the sagacity with which the enemy had selected his lair. They must attack through two high-walled gorges where machine-guns waited to mow them down. But the _Americanos_ meant to reach those guns before they were discovered, and after that the impregnable strong-hold would become a trap without exits. The column had therefore divided, each section taking a guide. The guides, with bayonets at their backs as reminders of their mission, had gone forward and with passwords bespoken the sentries, whose voices had been choked off in the pitchy darkness before they could give outcry. Then came the mountain yell, but it came only from the narrower gorge, and it was accompanied by musketry which the steep walls echoed and re-echoed. The flood of flight surged into a wave of disorganized rout toward the other opening--where it fell back in broken spray from volley and bayonet. Useless now were the machine-guns; worse than useless the impregnable walls of rock. The insurgent forces, remembering their red iniquities, asked no terms or quarter, but hurled themselves on the bayonets and went down in the close chaos of bolo and clubbed musket. "And luckiest of them that fell, were those of them that died."